


don't be a stranger

by reliquiaen



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-02-12 03:55:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12950763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reliquiaen/pseuds/reliquiaen
Summary: tumblr prompt: Character A can’t travel to see their family on Christmas, so they invite their grumpy loner neighbor Character B."Of course there’s a blizzard warning. Why wouldn’t there be? It’s Christmas, naturally the weather picks this week to act up."





	don't be a stranger

**Author's Note:**

> hi i'm alive. i haven't watched the show since like the start of season three though so. sorry. it's early aos characterisation lol. my inbox is open on tumblr for prompts, i'm trying to get back into the swing of writing so don't be shy! happy holidays! <3

Of course there’s a blizzard warning. Why wouldn’t there be? It’s Christmas, naturally the weather picks this week to act up.

“Sorry, honey,” her dad is saying for the twelfth time. “Will have to postpone my visit, I guess.”

“Yeah,” she sighs in response. “Yeah it’s okay. What can you do?”

She can see her dad’s teasing smile; imagine the way he winds up to a bad joke. “Fight the weather gods?”

“Good luck with that,” Daisy laughs.

She sobers when he says, “Try to have a good Christmas without me, okay?”

And she forces cheer into her tone to reply. “Should be easier now, actually.”

“Ha ha,” he says drolly. “I’ll see you in the new year.”

She hums a reply but the line disconnects before she can say anything else. She blames the weather.

Orphanage Christmases had always sucked and her foster dad had always made the effort to do better. This isn’t his fault but it stings all the same. Doesn’t help that all her friends are out of town too. Getting stupid jobs in stupid distant places, ugh. Having family in stupid far off locations. Stupid.

Daisy opens the fridge and stares at all the food she’d bought to cook with her dad wondering if she could feasibly eat it all herself and not die. At least she has ice cream. Excellent wallowing food.

Her phone rings again and she answers with, “Hey asshole.”

Lance laughs at her. “Hi jerk. Missing me for Christmas?”

“Oh yeah definitely.”

The connection wavers and she frowns at her phone. Lance says something but she can’t make it out through the static. If she didn’t know better she’d assume he was being a dick again. Just another Sunday.

Pulling her door open she steps out into the hall, ignoring the woman across from her. They’d never spoken a word and Daisy doesn’t expect that to change now.

Daisy storms down the stairs glaring at her phone, hoping that she’ll get better reception out on the street. But then she gets there and it’s fucking cold so that was the most instant regret she’s ever experienced. The phone beeps disconnected and she swears at it as if that’ll help at all.

She shoots one more venomous look at the snow swirling in a gale outside and then tromps back up the stairs. Her neighbour is still standing there watching her but Daisy just wants to go inside and eat a tub of ice cream with a giant spoon at this point.

“Hey, are you alright?”

She stops so abruptly someone could use footage of it to demonstrate good braking habits at traffic lights.

Daisy is pretty sure the woman didn’t think before blurting her question if the way her nose has scrunched up and gone pink is any indication. It’s adorable though, honestly.

“Uh,” Daisy begins, wondering why she picked now to speak. “Yeah. No. Weather ruined my plans.” Real smooth there, Johnson.

“Guess we’re both stuck here for Christmas.” There’s a sour note in the woman’s voice that Daisy had not been expecting.

“Well,” Daisy smiles crookedly. “I was already stuck here, but now I’m stuck by myself. Dad can’t make it.”

“Oh.” Something in her eyes flickers then as if she hadn’t anticipated that response. “My family is in England and…”

Daisy nods. “Can’t walk to England.”

The woman actually laughs at that and bites down on her lip to stop it. Daisy doesn’t notice that, of course.

(Except that she totally does.)

She hesitates, not knowing whether to press the conversation. (For months she’d been too chicken to say something and here she is.) Daisy tucks her hands into the front pockets of her jeans and rocks forward on her toes. “I’m Daisy, by the way,” she says before she once again loses all nerve to address her adorable neighbour. “Daisy Johnson.”

There’s barely a pause before the woman extends a hand. “Jemma Simmons.” Daisy’s hand slips free again and she takes it. “You’re not as surly as I’d thought.”

Jemma’s eyes immediately go wide but Daisy just laughs. “Surly, huh.”

“I didn’t mean to… I’m sure you’re not… Oh my god.” She’s gone red again and Daisy decides it was worth the sorta-insult. Jemma pulls her hand free though and that she regrets.

“That’s okay,” Daisy promises. “I wear my resting bitch face out of habit. I forgive you.”

Jemma seems on the verge of saying something but at the last second her mouth runs away from her again. Daisy wonders if she’s always like that. “Would you like to have dinner tomorrow night?” And then there’s a moment of panic and a flash of red in her cheeks and Jemma stammers to backtrack. “Because we’re both alone otherwise and… oh I don’t even know if you celebrate, because not everyone does. I’m sorry that’s such a stupid thing to ask a stranger.”

Daisy decides right then and there that she quite likes when Jemma rambles.

“Actually that’s a nice idea. Maybe if we had dinner and spoke once in a while we wouldn’t be strangers.” She can feel the mischievous curl to her lips and does nothing to stop it.

The bright, relieved smile she gets in return twangs at something low in her stomach and Daisy chooses to ignore the warning lights.

“Alright.” But Jemma’s face immediately falls. “Oh, but! I was going to England. I don’t have any food.”

Daisy waves her away. “No worries. I was expecting to challenge my dad to an eating contest. I could feed a dozen people.” She waits until Jemma’s smile returns to add, “But I’ll need help preparing it all.”

The comment earns her an eyeroll. “That sounds doable.”

 

\--

 

Jemma knocks on her door a bit after midday and Daisy is already halfway through baking her dad’s fruitcake recipe so she’s got mixture all up her arms when she pulls the door in.

“You are,” Jemma begins, smiling already, “a mess. What have you done?”

“My dad’s secret recipe,” Daisy told her. “I was hoping it’d be done before you got here actually.”

Jemma hooks a thumb at the door. “I can wait outside?” She’s smiling so Daisy’s pretty sure she’s joking, even if the smile is paper thin.

“No, that’s okay.” Daisy went back to mixing in the last few ingredients and waved her elbow at a silver tray on the opposite bench. “I don’t have enough hands; you could start on the turkey?”

Daisy has a feeling something witty is in the offing, perhaps about putting her to work. But she also gets the feeling that as soon as her back is turned Jemma is too busy looking around her apartment unobserved to bother.

“You don’t decorate much,” Jemma observes, setting about basting the turkey.

“I’ve never been a very ostentatious person.” She cuts a quick glance at Jemma. “I bet you lay the Christmas cheer on thick though, don’t you?”

Pointedly, Jemma avoids her gaze. “It reminds me of home,” she mumbles instead.

“I’m not judging,” she laughs. Then she nods at the bag Jemma brought with her. “What did you bring?”

“Oh.” She drops the glazing brush and turns wide eyed on Daisy, the same red from yesterday tinting her cheeks. “Well…”

“Mostly strangers, remember?”

It takes a few more seconds, Jemma picks up the brush again, but she finally admits, “I like music while I cook. So I brought some Christmas carols. I didn’t… It’s ok…”

“Do you have a dock with speakers?” Daisy asks before Jemma can stutter out more apologies. She gets a surprised look for it and then a slow nod. “Go for it.”

Jemma beams so she knows that was definitely the right answer.

The notion that she didn’t want to give the wrong answer came as a bit of a shock (since she’d only just met this woman really) but she rolled with it for the moment.

Now, Daisy had hated when the nuns made them go carolling at the orphanage. It was always too cold and people were rude. Her foster father had never really pushed any of those sorts of things on her which had been nice (carols were optional at their house). But Daisy found the way Jemma didn’t seem able to stop herself from singing along to Auld Lang Syne impossibly adorable and somewhat infectious.

So sure, she has a longstanding dislike of carols. But she’s also not one to miss an opportunity. Jemma’s singing is soft, unobtrusive; Daisy, when she joins in, pitches it just loud enough that she knows Jemma has to hear it.

“We too have run around the slopes, and picked the daisies fine.” She shoots a grin at Jemma, only a little worried that she’s overstepped. Jemma just rolls her eyes again.

“We’ve londoned many weary foot,” Jemma adds over the top of her. “Since auld lang syne.”

It’s nice. Maybe they don’t know each other very well, but Daisy’s a quick study. And Christmas had looked bleak yesterday, but Jemma’s enthusiasm is catching. Jemma bounces a little in time with a very peppy cover of Jingle Bells and when the turkey is in the oven and the fruitcake in the fridge cooling, she grabs Jemma by the wrist and spins her into the space between the kitchen island and the sofa.

“Oh no,” Jemma says. Doesn’t sound like she means it though

“Oh yes,” Daisy insists, grinning at her impishly.

“I don’t think we know each other well enough for this,” Jemma tells her flatly.

“All the more reason.”

It doesn’t last. Only to the end of the song, by that point Jemma is laughing too hard at Daisy’s overly elaborate twirling to continue. She falls against the back of the sofa and Daisy smiles, pushing herself up onto the island.

“Why on earth do you dance to carols?” Jemma asks her.

She shrugs a shoulder. “To any song. Dad dances when he cooks, I guess I picked it up from him. Better than the other.”

“The other?” Jemma doesn’t even hesitate but then again she has no reason to.

Daisy hunches a shoulder. “Live in an orphanage until I was eleven. The sisters didn’t much like dancing. Who knows why.”

Jemma bobs her head but instead of commenting on that she says, “My mum used to insist we go carolling every Christmas so we’d stand on the corner and sing in the freezing cold until dinner time. I’ve been told that the level of proficiency with the Twelve Days of Christmas is uncanny.”

Daisy waves a hand as if to say ‘please demonstrate’ and Jemma skips through her playlist until the song begins. True to her word, she nails it. Daisy is perfectly willing to say she’s impressed.

While they organise dinner Jemma tells her about England and her best friend growing up and moving to the states for work. As they serve, Daisy answers her gentle questions about the system and what it was like to finally find family and friends and how much it sucks when she has holidays alone. Jemma’s eyes light up when Daisy asks her about her job and she vomits words in a rush to talk about veterinary sciences and the problems the city has with exotic pets. She even listens with pointed attention when Daisy explains her job as a programmer for an IT firm developing various software and systems. She’s sure Jemma understands not a word but her gaze never wavers.

It’s better than the way Lance always teases her for ‘putting her hacking to a cause’.

The lights on Daisy’s tree – a small thing with fewer baubles on it than most – flicker to life just as the sun disappears. The sudden light interrupts Jemma as she asks, “You think we should clean up?”

“Ugh,” Daisy huffs. “Yeah probably.”

For a while they’re quiet, the only sounds Jemma’s still singing music dock and the clink of the dishes.

“I’m sorry I called you surly, earlier,” Jemma finally murmurs.

“Eh. I’ve been called worse.”

Silence again.

Daisy’s breaks it next with, “Thanks for having dinner with me, helping out and all that.”

“It was my pleasure,” Jemma assures her. “It’s awful being alone on the holidays so it was a win for both of us.”

“And how did dinner with a stranger on Christmas stack up against dinner with the extended family,” Daisy asks, her tone teasing as she eases the last pot back into its space.

“Well at least you didn’t ask about my love life, so that’s always a plus,” Jemma replies equally light. And yeah, maybe she hadn’t _asked_ but Daisy is pretty sure that she spent much of dessert with the mantra ‘please be single’ going over in her head like a broken record.

“I mean,” Daisy laughs, waggling her fingers. “It’s not too late for me to ask.”

“And ruin a lovely evening? You wouldn’t dare.”

Daisy feigns thoughtfulness for a second, tapping her chin. “Perhaps you don’t know me well enough just yet. Maybe we should have a Boxing Day lunch. From what you said about your studies I get the impression you’d be okay with revision.”

Jemma clucks her tongue. But her lips curl ever so slightly at the corners. For whatever reason that tugs at something in her chest, pulls until it’s taut and vaguely uncomfortable.

Daisy’s about to say something to relieve the tension when Jemma whispers, “If you want to ask me out you can just ask.”

Her eyebrows shoot up. Jemma doesn’t take it back, doesn’t say anything to indicate that Daisy wasn’t meant to hear it or that she misspoke. Actually her gaze is pretty level when it lands on Daisy’s face; her cheeks have turned that soft pink again though.

“I mean… isn’t asking you to lunch kind of the same?”

“Not under the guise of _getting to know_ your neighbour.”

“How about under the premise of ‘we’re basically snowed in so I can’t take you on a date but I will if you’ll let me when the weather clears’?”

This time it’s Jemma tapping her chin to draw the moment out agonisingly and Daisy’s heart sits in her throat.

“Alright,” Jemma relents. “Lunch date it is.” She takes two steps towards the door then and Daisy is about to ask her if she’ll stay but Jemma pre-empts her. “I promised my mum I’d try and face chat them this evening. I don’t think the weather will allow it but I can try.”

Daisy follows her to the door, bobbing her head in understanding. “It’s Christmas.”

“It’s not in England anymore,” Jemma says, reminding her of the time difference.

“Will they be awake?”

“They’re early risers.”

Jemma stops in the doorway and watches her carefully. Daisy gets the distinct impression that she’s being weighed, or perhaps Jemma’s considering her words, options. Either way it makes it hard for Daisy to hold Jemma’s eyes.

“Thank you,” Jemma says softly, softer than anything else she’s said that evening. She opens her mouth to say more but must think better of it. Instead she leans forward just slightly and presses a kiss to Daisy’s cheek. The sensation knocks her heart out of her throat at last. “Thank you,” she repeats before stepping away.

Daisy is still standing there a little dumbstruck when Jemma’s door closes behind her, the bells on the wreath pinned to her door tinkling quietly.

Maybe the weather hadn’t ruined Christmas after all.


End file.
